Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  The Nazis certainly weren’t laughing, and Mowrer could feel their mounting displeasure. In July, Colonel Frank Knox, the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, arrived in Berlin, still skeptical about some of the stories that his correspondent was filing from there. But by the time he left, he concluded two things: Mowrer was right about the rising terror, and it was time for his correspondent to leave. He informed Mowrer that he wanted to transfer him to Tokyo, since he was convinced that the Nazis could do him physical harm otherwise.

  Mowrer didn’t want to go but recognized that at some point he would almost certainly be expelled if he didn’t go voluntarily. He was also more outspoken than ever, not hiding his antipathy to Germany’s new masters. When he had the chance to talk to Dodd at social occasions, Mowrer expounded on the brutality of the regime but found the new ambassador cautious to the extreme, considering the correspondent too emotional on the subject. After a dinner party at the Dodds’, the ambassador noted in his diary: “I felt at the end that Mowrer was almost as vehement, in his way, as the Nazis, but I could understand his point of view.”

  Dodd’s reluctance to accept Mowrer’s dark vision of what was happening in Germany led the American correspondent to write off the ambassador’s appointment as “a blow to freedom.” It was a harsh judgment, but understandable given the contrast to the increasingly bold behavior of the far more experienced George Messersmith. The consul general vigorously protested the mistreatment of any Americans, including the correspondents, and, as a result, had developed close ties with them. In the Mowrer household, Messersmith’s number was written on three stands, since he would be the first person to call if anything happened to Edgar. “At this point, when even foreigners were dividing into sheep and goats, this American not only ‘stood up’ to the country to which he was accredited—a rare phenomenon!—but came out in the open in defense of everything finest in the American tradition,” Lilian Mowrer wrote. Messersmith’s earlier doubts had largely evaporated about the extent to which Nazi terror reflected Hitler’s will.

  Late one night in August, Edgar received a frantic phone call from the wife of Paul Goldmann, the Berlin correspondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse. “Oh, Mr. Mowrer, they have just arrested my husband!” she declared. Goldmann was sixty-eight, ailing, a Prussian Jew and one of the founders of the Foreign Press Association. He had been picked up in retaliation for the arrest and deportation of the German press officer in Vienna, and his wife was understandably terrified that he wouldn’t last long in a Nazi prison.

  When he hung up, Edgar let loose with his feelings. “The sons of bitches! Why don’t they pick on someone their own size?” Lilian recalled that she had never seen him so angry.

  Once he had calmed down, Edgar and Knickerbocker concocted a scheme to spring Goldmann. Knickerbocker told Goebbels that Mowrer would resign as president of the Foreign Press Association if they let Goldmann go. What he didn’t tell him was that Edgar knew already that he was going to be transferred to Tokyo soon. Learning about this, some other American correspondents told Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels that they were willing to spend a day each in jail in exchange for Goldmann’s freedom. The Nazis happily took Mowrer up on his offer, promptly releasing their prisoner.

  There was just one catch: the authorities also confiscated the German passport of Goldmann’s wife to make sure he didn’t try to leave the country or do anything “unfriendly.” But she was an Austrian by birth and immediately filed for divorce so that she could reclaim her Austrian citizenship—and an Austrian passport.

  Lilian Mowrer asked “the plucky old lady” whether it didn’t hurt her to take such drastic action after so many years of marriage. “No, my dear,” she replied, although the tears in her eyes told a different story. “It is true that I shall divorce him, but that is merely a matter of expediency. I shall continue to live with my husband . . . in sin.”

  When some of Mowrer’s American and British colleagues filed stories about how he had outwitted the authorities since he was going to be transferred to Tokyo anyway, the Nazi press proclaimed that they had succeeded in getting rid of a “sworn and proven enemy” from the top job at the Foreign Press Association. Storm troopers showed up outside Mowrer’s office and apartment, followed him around town and often followed his acquaintances as well. Messersmith was so concerned about him that he made a point of always leaving him a phone number where he could be reached when he went out in the evenings. Lilian lived in constant anxiety about her husband. The presence of the Brownshirts was “a horrible menace,” she recalled, “for there was practically nothing they could not have done at that period.”

  The climax came quickly. The Mowrers had originally planned to move to Tokyo in October, but the Nazis kept cranking up the pressure that August. The German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, whom Mowrer had once considered a friend, informed the State Department and Colonel Knox that because of “the people’s righteous indignation” his government could no longer guarantee his physical safety. The Nazis were particularly anxious to force his departure before the party’s annual celebration in Nuremberg on September 2, which he was still hoping to cover.

  Worried that his reporter was in severe jeopardy, Knox sent a telegram telling Mowrer to leave right away. Edgar still wanted to resist, at least delaying his departure until after the Nuremberg event to show that he would not be intimidated. But Ambassador Dodd urged him to leave sooner. “If you were not being moved by your paper anyway, we would go to the mat on this issue, but it only means hastening your departure by six days,” he told him. “Won’t you do this to avoid complications?” While Mowrer bitterly resented the new ambassador’s reluctance to take a stronger stand against the regime, even Messersmith and Knickerbocker concurred with Dodd’s judgment. They figured that the risks were too high for their friend and it was time for him to get out.

  Mowrer finally agreed to leave on September 1, with Lilian and their daughter staying behind for a short while to pack up. Before Edgar’s departure, his British and American fellow correspondents presented him with a silver rose bowl inscribed to a “gallant fighter for the liberty of the Press.” And as he prepared to board a train for Paris from the Bahnhof Zoo, Messersmith rushed over from a dinner party to give him an embrace.

  Others were at the train station in a more official capacity, making sure that the correspondent who had been such an irritant really departed. Shortly before his departure, a young German official sardonically asked him: “And when are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?”

  “Why, when I can come back with two million of my countrymen,” the correspondent replied.

  It took a moment for the official to absorb the import of his statement: Mowrer was envisaging a day when American soldiers would march into a defeated Germany. “Aber nein. Impossible,” the official protested loudly.

  Mowrer didn’t let that pass; he wasn’t about to leave Germany without having the last word. “Not for the Führer,” he said. “The Führer can bring anything about . . . even that.”

  6

  “Like Football and Cricket”

  Martha Dodd was twenty-four when she arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1933 with her father, the new American ambassador, her mother and brother. Recalling her state of mind later, she stressed how naïve and uninformed she was about politics, with almost no idea about what Germany would be like—or what its new Nazi rulers represented. While her father had evident misgivings and mentioned several times that he wasn’t sure how long their Berlin assignment would last, Martha seemed largely oblivious to them. “I do not remember any of us being especially disturbed by the thought of living under a dictatorship,” she wrote in her Berlin memoir Through Embassy Eyes.

  She was hardly alone in that respect. Many Americans were still agnostic about Hitler and his movement, including some of the country’s leading literary figures. At a farewell dinner for the Dodds hosted by the German-American societies in Chicago, Martha sat between Thornton Wilder and Carl
Sandburg. Wilder urged Martha to learn German quickly and spend her time with Germans instead of the foreign community in Berlin, while Sandburg offered this bit of advice: “Find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and blood are made of. Before your eyes will pass the greatest pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats, and geniuses. You will see every nationality in the world. Watch them, study them, dissect them. Don’t be frightened or diffident, don’t let them or your experiences spoil you or your eagerness for life. Be brave and truthful, keep your poetry and integrity.”

  All of which inspired Martha to view this journey into the unknown as a great adventure, which she planned to experience with the “eagerness for life” that Sandburg commended to her. As for the other qualities—bravery, truthfulness, integrity—there would be plenty of disagreement among those who met Martha in Germany whether she lived up to them, along with endless gossip about her behavior, particularly with a procession of men of various ages and nationalities. If her father often appeared to be stumbling through his time in Berlin, not quite sure what he should or could be doing, Martha was anything but “frightened or diffident.” In that sense, she took Sandburg’s words very much to heart.

  Growing up in Chicago, Martha had gone to University High School, which was labeled by students from rival schools as “Jew High.” By her own admission, Martha was also “slightly anti-Semitic.” As she put it, “I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as attractive physically as Gentiles and were less socially presentable.” She recalled that when she went to the University of Chicago, even some of her professors “resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.”

  After college, Martha got a job as the assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. She also married “for a short period unhappily.” But in matters of the heart, she wasn’t quite the naïve young woman that she appeared to be politically. She didn’t bother to inform most of her new acquaintances in Berlin that she was married—and not yet divorced. “I suppose I practiced a great deception on the diplomatic corps by not indicating that I was a married woman at that time,” she noted with evident amusement. “But I must admit I rather enjoyed being treated like a maiden of eighteen knowing all the while my dark secret.”

  While no maiden, Martha succeeded in charming many of those who met her for the first time. Upon seeing her arrive with her parents in Berlin on July 12, 1933, Bella Fromm described the daughter of the new ambassador as “a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” When William Shirer, the new bureau chief of the Universal News Service and soon-to-be-famous CBS broadcaster, arrived in Berlin the following year, he noted in his diary that Martha spent many evenings at Die Taverne, the restaurant where American correspondents gathered almost every evening after filing their stories. Shirer described her as “pretty, vivacious, a mighty arguer.”

  But Martha also triggered other feelings, particularly among the embassy wives. Kay Smith returned with her husband, Truman Smith, the military attaché who had been the first American official to meet Hitler in 1922, for a second tour at the Berlin embassy in 1935. “Martha had an apartment of her own on the top floor of the Embassy,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “She was small, delicate looking, blue eyed, pink and white complexion, a little Dresden figurine. Appearances are deceiving. Martha had a way with the gentlemen and it was said no scruples. As time went on I heard rumors that she entertained men at all hours in her apartment.”

  Martha certainly had a predilection for romance, both political and personal. When it came to politics, her first judgment as a new arrival was that Germany and its new rulers had been unfairly condemned by world opinion—and she needed to help set the record straight. “We liked Germany, and I was enchanted by the kindness and simplicity of the people . . . everything was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic,” she recalled. “I felt that the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.” When she made the rounds of reasonably priced restaurants, she found herself comparing her experiences to what she knew of France: “The Germans seemed much more genuine and honest, even in the merchant class.”

  Soon after her arrival, Martha met fellow countryman Quentin Reynolds, who was also a newcomer to Germany. Reynolds had been sent to Berlin in early 1933 by the International News Service to fill in for the regular correspondent, who had run afoul of the new Nazi rulers. He went straight from writing baseball stories about the superstar Ty Cobb to covering the biggest foreign story of the era. By his own admission, he had only “saloon German” and “no special grasp of current events.” But he credited fellow correspondents with giving him a crash course in local politics. Knickerbocker urged him to read Mein Kampf right away. “No American I know of has taken the trouble to read it seriously, but it’s all there: his plan for the conquest of Europe,” he told him.

  By the time he met Martha Dodd, Reynolds was also friendly with Putzi Hanfstaengl, who regularly dropped by Die Taverne. “I regret to say that on first acquaintance he struck me as a likeable fellow,” Reynolds recalled later. “He was a tremendous man physically, with heavy features, dark eyes, and a mane of coal-black hair that he kept tossing back. With an ingratiating manner, he was a compulsive and amusing talker and, unlike other Nazis I later had to do business with, he went out of his way to be cordial to Americans. You had to know Putzi to really dislike him.”

  Martha was impressed that Reynolds, who had only been in the country a few months, already knew “such legendary figures” as Hanfstaengl and arranged for her to be introduced to him. At a party thrown by an English journalist—“a lavish and fairly drunken affair,” as Martha recalled—the Nazi propagandist lived up to her expectations. “Putzi came in late in a sensational manner, a huge man in height and build, towering over everyone present,” she noted. “He had a soft, ingratiating manner, a beautiful voice which he used with conscious artistry, sometimes whispering low and soft, the next minute bellowing and shattering the room. He was supposed to be the artist among the Nazis, erratic and interesting, the personal clown and musician to Hitler himself . . . Bavarian and American blood produced this strange phenomenon.”

  Like other Americans, Martha would find herself frequently in Hanfstaengl’s company, dancing with him at parties and gladly taking advantage of his offers to introduce her to Nazi luminaries. But Reynolds was already developing a healthy sense of skepticism about him while remaining careful not to show it. About a month after Reynolds arrived, he ran into Hanfstaengl at the bar of the Adlon Hotel. “You’ve been here a month now, and you haven’t asked me about our so-called Jewish problem or written anything about it to annoy me,” Putzi told him. “How come, Quent?”

  “Give me time, Putzi,” Reynolds replied. “I haven’t been here long enough to know what’s going on.”

  By the time he met Martha, Reynolds not only knew more but was eager to explore more for himself. In August, he suggested to Martha and her brother Bill that they take their Chevrolet and travel to southern Germany and Austria together with him—an idea that immediately appealed to Martha. As they drove south, she recognized the word “Jude” in banners strung across the road; they realized this was anti-Semitic propaganda but, as Martha put it, “we didn’t—at least I didn’t—take it too seriously.”

  In fact, Martha was so swept up by the sight of marching Brown-shirts and the apparent enthusiasm of the people, she responded equally enthusiastically. When Germans saw their special license plate with a low number, they assumed the trio of Americans were top officials—and welcomed them with “Heil Hitler” greetings. “The excitement of the people was contagious and I ‘Heiled’ as vigorously as any Nazi,” she recalled. Although Reynolds and her brother mocked her behavior, “I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me
,” she admitted.

  Around midnight, the Americans stopped for the night in Nuremberg. As they reached their hotel on Königstrasse, they were surprised to find the street filled with an excited crowd and speculated that they may have run into a toymakers’ festival. As he registered, Reynolds asked the hotel clerk if there was going to be a parade. The clerk laughed. “It will be kind of a parade,” he replied. “They are teaching someone a lesson.”

  The visitors walked out to join the crowd. Everyone seemed in a good mood, with the sound of a band adding to the festive atmosphere. Then they saw Nazi banners and swastikas, and the source of the music: a marching band of Storm Troopers. Two tall troopers were dragging someone between them. “I could not at first tell if it was a man or a woman,” Reynolds wrote. “Its head had been clipped bald, and face and head had been coated with white powder. Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown.” As the Brownshirts straightened out their victim, the Americans spotted the placard around its neck: “I wanted to live with a Jew.”

  As the “lesson” continued, the Americans learned from the crowd that this was a woman named Anna Rath. The reason for her harsh punishment: she had tried to marry her Jewish fiancé, defying the ban on mixed marriages. Martha remembered the image of her “tragic and tortured face, the color of diluted absinthe.” She also was startled by Reynolds’s reaction. She had believed him to be a “hard-boiled” journalist, but “he was so shaken by the whole scene that he said the only thing he could do was to get drunk, to forget it.”

  The Nazis wound up the evening by playing the “Horst Wessel Song” as about 5,000 people stood singing, their right arms extended—and then everyone disappeared. Although she suddenly felt nervous and cold, with her earlier elation fully gone, Martha still tried to convince Reynolds that he shouldn’t file anything about the incident. She argued that her presence and that of her brother would make this a sensational story, and, after all, who knew what the Nazi side of the story really was. And it had to be an isolated case.